Currently, in India, it takes between six months to two years to teach people to read.  Multiply that by hundreds of millions.  It represents a staggering amount of effort, persistence, patience and manpower to make even the smallest dent.

        If we could cut the time and effort it takes to teach an adult non-literate (and kids) how to read in a fraction of the current time, we could then begin to anticipate the sort of literacy levels that most other countries have.  Conventional wisdom is that it takes a long time, and the drop-out rates will always be high.

A courseroom,basic,austere,but they learn

        Well, we found a way to slash the conventional reading times.  We went back to the basic  principles, and constructed a hypothesis, like any good scientist, and tested the hypothesis, and hey presto, it worked!

        The result was TARA Akshar - our programme to make non-literates learn to read and speak Hindi in the minimum possible time with the least possible effort on part of the learner.  Preliminary results indicate that it teaches adults to read in less than a month, and doesn’t need a qualified teacher. 

        All it needs is a computer and a willing instructor, who has had a week’s training.

        The author, an Englishman working for Development Alternatives / TARAhaat in Delhi, was vainly trying to teach himself how to speak Hindi.  He found it difficult to remember the meanings of words.  So he started experimenting with ancient memory systems used by the Greeks and Romans.  He found that by the judicious use of memory techniques, he was able to remember up to 50 new words a day.  Then he started to learn to read Hindi (or Devnagiri) script, but had a hard time remembering which letter represented which sound.  So he used the same techniques, and they worked very well indeed. Then, he tried it on his friends, and they learnt as well.

        We tested the first batch of 24 after 18 days and found that 75 percent of them could read!  No, they weren’t about to sit down and go through the Mahabharata, they were still on the cat-sat-on-the-mat stage, but they could manage simple reading without any assistance.1    So, the students were then put onto a Reading club, which runs in the Community Hall every day, where they come and practice reading out loud together to improve their reading speeds.  It is important to note that the drop out rate was only 20 percent, an astonishingly low figure as anyone who has tried running similar schemes in Indian rural areas will tell you.

        Surely, there’s a lot more to reading than remembering what sound is which letter?

        Well, not really!  Read the following out loud:

        Not too difficult, was it?  That’s because you, the reader, have total certainty on your English alphabet.  For our students, it’s much easier, because they know that almost every word they are going to read is a word that they are already familiar with.

        (Yes, the words above are complete nonsense; they are not a foreign language!)

        In this course, the student is not going to try  to memorize anything, rather he/she is going to apply the techniques and the memorizing will look after itself.

n Take ten seconds or more and get a picture in your mind of yourself shovelling rice into your mouth. 

n Have an imaginary voice in your head make the pun “let’s chaval rice into your mouth”.

        You will now remember that rice = chaval for several days or weeks.  That’s because you made an association between the sound ‘chaval’ and the unforgettable picture of rice being shovelled into your mouth.

        The astonishing thing is that you, the reader, are being subjected to these techniques all the time.  They are working on you, and you probably don’t know it.  Well, when was the last time you bought anything significant that you had not seen advertised on TV!  Most TV advertisements use memory techniques to get you to remember their products.

        There is one man who is an evangelist for memory techniques.  He is Tony Buzan, an English psychologist and internationally best-selling author, famous for inventing the technique of Mind Mapping.  He went into an under-performing school in England with a BBC film crew and issued a challenge.  He asked for six underachievers (all aged around 13) and with just a few days training of them and their teachers, he would turn them into something extraordinary in six months.  He used memory techniques, Mind Mapping and a few other devices.  The kids were tested by independent psychologists before and after. The results were extraordinary.  The six kids went from the bottom of the scale to the top.  Their study and their self-esteem as well as communication abilities improved enormously.